340 Hickory Drive / 1965
If you reach a dead end, or 1964, you’ve gone too far.
You have now arrived in the small capital city of Alabama at the house where you first learned your name, Seth, though of course you don’t remember learning your name, just as you don’t remember or understand how you arrived here. Maybe transported by dream, maybe by memory, or by the dream we call memory and pretend to trust as real as we drive the streets we used to know where the landmarks have almost disappeared from our imagination. Who are you hoping to find, your mother made young again, your father before middle age? Is it your small, child-self you want to discover? Or your older brother, Michael, before, long before, ships took him out to sea and drugs took him even farther toward the blue horizon?
Here is the blue-painted kitchen of your house, its sink with the very same faucet you couldn’t reach when your brother fed you a jalapeno pepper, first telling you it was a pickle, then wouldn’t get water for you, not a single drop. Your father at work, your mother run to the store, the heat on your four-year-old tongue ever-present and incendiary.
Now in the hallway you step across the furnace grate that always scared you in the winter, a fear you’d almost forgotten, and you find, at the far end of the hall, your brother’s shirtless body bathed in hard light, covered in blood, and sprawled across the floor. You run screaming toward him, face wet with tears, place hands on his shoulders, and he is resurrected into laughter and ketchup, and you then want the blood to be real, to pour from his wounded body, a boy’s pocketknife in your little hand.
Were these the only two times your parents, for a brief moment, left the two of you alone at such young ages? What would he have done to push beyond mere mischief with a third opportunity?
You turn and look through a doorway and see your shared bedroom with its twin beds on either side of a front window. It is night outside, and the room is mostly dark, but between the beds and beneath a sheet draped over kitchen chairs, you see traces of light, and now you are secreted beneath that sheet, and you see your young self and you are your young, child-self, your brother cross-legged before you holding the flashlight pointed upward, an eerie glow spread across your faces.
“Periscope down,” he says. “We’re diving deep.”
You are beside yourself, hidden away with your brother, who, at six years your senior, commands the submersible. You can hear the sonar blips like the ones you’ve heard on television as you travel deeper and deeper. The two of you are carried far beneath the blue surface of your imagination to a secret place you didn’t know existed until now, a place where maybe only brothers can go. Your brother knows another secret, one he hasn’t told you, a secret that won’t surface for years. While you both share the same last name, your father is not his father. Learning this will one day shake you, and maybe, eventually, explain your brother to you.
238 Palmetto Street / 1960
If you reach Polk Street, or 1959, you’ve gone too far.
Here is a house, a duplex rather, that you have never lived in and have never even seen, and yet you stand outside it, recognize it, and know the place in the same capitol city where your parents and your brother lived before you were born. You do not go inside but look toward the yard three houses down, begin to walk toward it, and find yourself there more quickly than the pace of your steps can account for. You know why you are hurrying. It is winter and the large trees in the side yard are bare, and so you can easily see the grass rope slung over a low-hanging limb and see your brother’s body dangling from the rope’s end, no proper noose but a more-than-adequate knot. He twists, turns, and kicks his feet that are only inches from the ground. His hands are grasping desperately at his neck, and you see what you already understand. He cannot breathe. There is nothing you can do. You make yourself remember that you aren’t born yet, but it doesn’t help. He’s your brother and he’s dying. Two boys pull at the other end of the rope, and a third in a cowboy hat who’s bigger than the other two, bigger than your brother, stands near, just beyond your brother’s kicks. “You’re gonna be a dead outlaw,” he says, but you know cowboys and bandits are only this wrecked boy’s excuse for the rise of his vigilante blood.
Now your brother, out of his pure-blooded athletic ability inherited from the father he no longer sees, takes both hands, reaches upward, and with one hand loosens the knot and slips free, falling to the ground. Then he’s up with quick and furious motion and springs at the larger boy, knocks him to the ground, head butts him in the face, punches him, kicks him. The cowboy now runs, his hat forgotten, his fear perhaps grown as large as his wonderment at what he’s unleashed and set into motion. Your brother does not look for the other two boys, seems to know, instinctively, they are already gone. Instead, he rubs at the rope burns that lace his neck, lets his fingers run their traces, feels the heat there that will forever run through his body, and knows he can trust it, rely on it, call it up when needed, and will be unable to tamp it back down. Maybe this last truth he doesn’t know, not yet, and doesn’t understand how he will struggle with it.
1632 West Wilding Drive / 1971
If you reach Spring Valley Road, or 1970, you’ve gone too far.
You walk immediately into your brother’s room and see yourself spinning, laughing, and feel your stomach flipping. Your brother has you lifted over his head and is turning in tight circles faster and faster. You’ve turned ten and are bigger and heavier, but you know he will not drop you.
Hours earlier—you remember now—he was walking home from up the street and saw you punch a boy who’d been bullying you. He watched the boy drop to the ground like a bag of sand and saw you run because you were afraid you’d hurt the boy badly. When your brother approached you, grave-faced, on the front porch where you stood, you thought you were in big trouble. He reached for you, grabbed your shoulder, shook it roughly, then said, “I have never been more proud of you,” and his face broke open and dissolved your worry, turning it into pride. You are spinning even faster now and know the center will not hold, the Easy Rider poster on his bedroom wall flashing past and flashing past, you spinning like the motorcycle wheels you catch glimpses of, and now you are flying, rising in an arc, riding the air longer than what feels possible, then, finally, landing on his double bed, bouncing, slowly settling, laughing still.
You realize when you push yourself up that your arm is still sore, bruised. Not from his spinning and throwing you, not from the confrontation with the bully, but bruised from your brother’s fist. Days ago, he grabbed your wrist, twisted your arm tight to the point of pain, and punched you like a boxer up and down between your shoulder and elbow, making bruises that would spread across themselves within hours and ache for days.
Older brothers just do this. It’s something you know and don’t doubt, don’t question, though you don’t know why. You don’t tell, either, especially now that you know your father is not his father. Your mother has told you she was married before, that Michael was born then, before she married your father, and while you believed her, what she said hardly felt real, still does not, but you know without thinking that you should not tell your father what your brother is doing to you. You can’t put the thoughts together for yourself, but you understand you’re too protected, too favored by your father, and though you don’t know you suspect this, you have always been favored, and you know in these last months there has already been too much trouble. You don’t want to add to it.
One morning you walk into the kitchen (where you stand now beside the avocado green refrigerator) and see the dark mirrors of your father’s and brother’s anger reflecting each other, your father saying, “And just what were you and your friend boiling on the stove last night? Something to get you high?” He keeps repeating the last question over and over until you can’t stand it, and your brother finally breaks, says, “Yes. That what you want to hear?” Then you hear your mother saying words you already know by heart: “Michael H. Anderson, I’ve had it up to here with you.” Her flattened hand is raised to her chin.
Now you watch from the doorway of your brother’s room and see yourself sit up on the edge of his bed and see him open a small dresser drawer and dig into the junk inside, pulling out a small object. He turns to you, holding out his open palm. It’s his Boy Scout compass that sits inside a small blue box with a clear plastic cover. The red needle spins, as if disoriented by your brother’s quick movements. “Would you like to have this?” he says. Your eyes widen the way a boy’s will. “Why?” you say, though your question doesn’t really answer his. “So you can find your way,” he says and laughs in a manner that isn’t really a laugh. “I don’t need it anymore.”
You hear his words just as clearly now as you did then as you stand watching from his bedroom door, wondering if your brother understood his metaphor as you do in this present moment. You suspect he did and aren’t surprised by this. You take the compass and hold it still. The red needle settles on him. Days later, he will run away. It probably didn’t matter to him what direction he ran. After weeks pass, it is your father who will find him, not the authorities who were searching, and it will be your mother, not your father, who sends him to detention. You will learn all of this later, and you will never lose the compass and will always know the direction it points and understand that blood has its own pole.
423589 Highway 34 / 1974
If you reach Lloyd Chapel Road, or 1973, you’ve gone too far.
You now travel a hundred miles west and twenty-six years backward. The journey takes no measurable amount of time. The numbered address you’ve come to did not exist in 1974. No numbered addresses existed in Riverfield, Alabama, until someone decided that ambulances needed a means of knowing exactly where to arrive.
Now your brother has arrived just outside the back door of your grandparents’ house, where you’ve lived with your father since the divorce. You answered the knock, and now you can feel yourself tense up, as if you are about to be repeatedly punched. You see that your brother’s smile holds something in it, something secret, just as it did the last time he showed up at this door. He is wide-eyed, his pupils large, and you don’t yet know what this means. All the words he says to you, even his “hey, brother,” don’t quite make sense, though you can’t say why they don’t. Each word is recognizable and mostly follows the last, but they only form circles that are meant to leave you at a loss and off balance.
Your father comes up behind you. You didn’t see him then, not at first, but you do now, just as you see your twelve-year-old self, and you see in his face how pleased your father is at Michael’s appearance, and you hurt for your father because even at twelve you know Michael isn’t here for him, or for you. Michael is here for himself only and can’t and couldn’t explain why, not in the circle of his words and the large circles of his eyes. He can’t know himself just how lost he is and how his need to express being lost is as desperate an act as a little boy trying to free himself from the circle of a tightening rope.
More words are exchanged, yours, your father’s, Michael’s, but Michael’s sound as if they are arising from a place too deep for a submersible to reach, and the syllables drown before they break the surface.
You notice finally the strange car parked in the drive and the figure of another long-haired young man in the driver’s seat who sits waiting, and you know Michael will not even enter the house. You hear him call your father “Conrad,” not “Daddy,” for the second time in your life, and though you understand why, it is still a word that does not make sense, but it says, “You are not my father. You never have been.”
Now Michael turns in a circle, as if he’s searching for something, and you see a look of grave understanding pass over your father’s face, along with disappointment and concern, and hurt. And you know your father has heard what Michael said when he used the name “Conrad.” Then you hear the words “bye, brother,” and Michael is walking down the steps, walking away and away, from you, from your father, from this house where he never spent a night, and you know why now—because your father’s parents were never his grandparents, only yours.
125 Southern Boulevard / 1976
If you reach Woodley Road, or 1975, you’ve gone too far.
It is nighttime, and you stand outside in the parking lot of a bar you have passed many times in this city where you were born, but you’ve never been inside because you were too young. Your brother was not too young, though, and you are here now on the night he last entered the establishment. He is already inside, you figure, and even though the place looks mostly dark through the windows you can see people moving, drinking, playing pool, smoking. You cannot remember any of this because you were not here, and yet you are able now to catch glimpses of something more than imagination and something less than dream. Maybe you’ve entered your brother’s memory. Who’s to say?
A month before this you saw him in the hospital, beaten by drug dealers, though you didn’t know then who had beaten him, nor why, and wouldn’t know for years. Now you are waiting for another beating. It can’t be long. There’s a closing together of bodies on the other side of the glass you’re peering through, where you have your hands placed on either side of your eyes and pressed against the cool glass, where your forehead touches, also. You see your brother from behind, watch his fist slam into the face of the bartender, and see your brother crawl over the bar, swinging another fist as he moves, and even in the midst of his violence you can’t help but admire the athlete he could have been. The bartender attempts to flee, running out from behind the bar, but your brother catches him, turns him, lands a final blow to his face, and the man crumples to the floor.
The glass you peer through now flashes a deep blue, pulses with the color of blood before it’s shed from the body and oxygen turns it crimson. Policemen appear in your vision and handcuff your brother, who looks toward you but cannot see you, of course, but you see past his narrow-eyed anger to someone lost still, filled with the emptiness of something denied early on, an emptiness a second father could not fill—not that fathers can answer all the mysteries contained within your brother.
Weeks later, he will tell you he joined the Navy, that his grandfather—the one who is also your grandfather—told him he might want to think about the military. This will be a lie. He will eventually tell you it was another old man, one in a black robe in a courthouse downtown, who gave him a choice that was no choice at all.
For years you will get cryptic postcards from all over the Mediterranean, and it will be years before you see him again.
101 First Street North, Apt. #4 / 1989
If you reach Second Avenue North, or 1988, you’ve gone too far.
You are in graduate school now, in Tuscaloosa, but you have visited this apartment in Jacksonville Beach once, two years earlier, and you saw your brother and his wife who seemed to be doing well enough then, your brother a tug master in Mayport Basin. But soon after came the court-martial for testing positive, and your brother, miraculously, beat the rap and remained in the Navy.
Now you are screaming at him, though you cannot hear yourself clearly, your voice only a tinny, electrical sound, because at this moment you are not on the phone in Tuscaloosa; you are watching your brother on the telephone with you, seeing him hold the receiver away from his ear.
He is desperate for money and has just told you they are about to be evicted and have no food, no electricity, and that his wife has a pistol in her hand and will kill herself if you don’t send money. He says your mother hung up on him when he called her. “She’s our mother,” you said. When he told you that you were a cheap miser who cared more about money than his own brother, that’s when you screamed at him and told him you didn’t have any money, that you know he’s lying, that his wife does not have a gun to her head. You are shaking now as you watch your brother’s gaunt, hunched figure, just as you know you were shaking on the other end of that phone line years earlier, overcome with anger, worry, and despair for your brother who you know is strung out on the worst form of cocaine any user could ever lay hands upon and who will use those hands for begging, borrowing, and stealing, and then see them handcuffed.
You will wire your brother three hundred dollars that you don’t really have and will know it is the wrong thing to do. The Navy will finally part company with your brother, and in the bargain he will receive an honorable discharge. There will be more calls, and you will not send money. Then you will move and not let your brother have your new phone number.
3809 Third Avenue South, Apt. B / 2000
If you reach Fourth Street South, you’ve gone too far.
The year is now, and the dream of what will come has replaced memory, at least for the moment, as your wife, Rachel, holds your hand and you draw closer with each passing mile to your destination, following printed directions to Jacksonville Beach that are almost too small to read. You see your brother in a wheelchair, in this waking dream of yours, battling the nerve pain he told you about only two months before in the first of several awkward phone calls prompted by your wife. Now all the drugs he takes are legal, powerful, and in dosages that might kill others. A wheelchair or a walker, he’s told you, depending on the amount of pain. You are afraid to see the toll the disease may have taken and wonder if it was brought on or hastened by all the self-induced damage he inflicted on his body. Or maybe the disease had lain in wait all of his life, attacking him on its own volition.
He has described its particulars for you in detail but not in sorrow or self-pity, more through a rough, gallows humor, each laugh an escape from a knotted rope, a humor born of blood close to the color of ketchup. “You ought to see me in this chair. Got a flag-painted gas tank. I kid you not. The hell with a battery. Call me Captain America. Hopper and Fonda got nothing on me. I’m the easy rider.” You realize what hard-won courage this takes, what guts laughter really demands, your admiration for him reborn, grown larger than what you felt within as he held you, spun you, flung you harmlessly into a high arc over a bed, you filled with your own laughter that was innocent and easy.
But all these memories that have come back, or that you found your way to, or dreamed, can you really make meaning out of them, find a shape, a direction, a destination you recognize or desire? This is your question, your fear, as you drive. Maybe there is no connection between the past and the present. No sense to be found. A journey in reverse may lead to a place you can’t escape and can’t reconcile with the now or the future, even a future so very near, maybe only an hour away.
Here is a memory presenting itself, one you can’t locate or pinpoint by year, but it is real, visceral even. Your brother is driving your grandfather’s El Camino, the grandfather you both can claim, and you’re sitting beside him when he stomps the accelerator to the floor, pushing the truck past all conceivable power its engine can possibly hold, and though it shakes, shimmies, whines and rattles, and feels like it’s about to explode, the thrill of it captures you both, the thrill of everything ahead. You fly past time and place, and though you can’t see or name your destination, you know in the moment then, and now, that in the intersection where speed and breakdown collide, you will both arrive.
